[For this post, I’ll assume some familiarity with the concept of moral trade and the distinction between consequentialist and deontological values.]

In earlier work, I claimed that (in the specific context of ECL) if you are trying to benefit someone’s moral view as part of some cooperative arrangement, only the consequentialist aspects of their moral values are relevant to you. That is, if you want to act cooperatively toward Alice’s moral values, then you need to consider only the consequentialist components of Alice’s value system. For instance, you need to ask yourself: Would Alice wish for there to be fewer lies? You don’t need to ask yourself whether Alice considers it a moral imperative not to lie herself (except insofar as it relates to the former question).

While I still believe that there’s some truth to this claim, I now believe that the claim is straightforwardly incorrect. In short, it seems plausible that, for example, Alice’s moral imperative not to lie extends to actions by others that Alice brings about via trade. (Furthermore, it seems plausible that this is the case even if Alice doesn’t consider it a moral imperative to, for example, donate money to fund fact checkers in a distant country. That is, it seems plausible that this is the case even if Alice doesn’t care about lies in a fully consequentialist way.) I’ll give further intuition pumps for the relevance of deontological constraints below. I’ll take a more abstract perspective in the section right after giving the examples.

Related work. Toby Ord’s article on moral trade also has a section (titled “Consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics”) that discusses how the concept of moral trade interacts with the distinction between deontological and consequentialist ethics. (He also discusses virtue ethics, which I ignore to keep it simple.) However, he doesn’t go into much detail and seems to make different points than this post. For instance, he argues that even deontologists are often somewhat consequentialist (which my earlier writing also emphasizes). He also makes at least one point that is somewhat contrary to the claims in this article. I will discuss this briefly below (under example P1).

Examples. I’ll now give some examples of situations in which it seems intuitively compelling that someone’s deontological duties propagate through a trade relationship (P1–3). I’ll vary both the duties and the mode of trade. I’ll then also provide two negative examples (N1,2), i.e., examples where deontological norms arguably don’t propagate through trade. The examples are somewhat redundant. There’s no need to read them all!

The examples will generally consider the perspective of the deontologist’s trading partner who is uncertain about the deontologist’s views (rather than the deontologist herself). I’m taking the deontologist’s trading partner’s perspective because I’m interested in how to deal with other’s deontological views in trade. I’ll assume that one cannot simply ask the deontologist, because this would shift all difficulty to the deontologist and away from the deontologist’s trading partner.

P1: Say you have a friend Alice. Alice follows the following policy: Whenever someone does something that’s good for her moral views, Alice pays them back in some way, e.g., monetarily. For instance, Alice is concerned about animal welfare. Whenever she learns that hardcore carnivore Bob eats a vegetarian meal, she sends him a dollar. (There are lots of practical game-theoretic difficulties with this – can vegetarians all earn free money from Alice by claiming that they are vegetarian only to be nice to her? – but let’s ignore these.)

Now, let’s say that Carol is considering what actions to take in light of Alice’s policy. Carol comes up with the following idea. Perhaps she should put up posters falsely claiming that local cows graze from heavily polluted pastures. Let’s say that she is sure that this has a positive impact on animal welfare (i.e., that she has reason to not be concerned about backlash, etc.). But now let’s say that Alice once said that she wouldn’t want to lie even when doing so has positive consequences. Meanwhile, she also isn’t a “truth maximizer”; she argued that the cause of correcting others’ inconsequential lies out in the world isn’t worthwhile. Should Carol expect to receive payment?

To me it seems plausible that Carol shouldn’t or at least she should be doubtful about whether she will be paid. (For what it’s worth, it seems that Claude 3 agrees.) Given Alice’s stance on lying, Alice surely wouldn’t want to put up the posters herself. It seems plausible to me that Alice then also wouldn’t want to pay Carol to put up such posters (even if the payment is made in retrospect).

Here’s one way to think about it. Imagine that Alice has written a book, “What I’m happy to pay people to do”. The book contains a list with items such as “raise awareness of animal welfare conditions under factory farming”, “eating less meat”, etc. Would we expect the book to contain an item, “put up misleading posters that cause people to avoid meat”? Again, I would imagine that the answer is no. Putting such an item in the book is directly causing others to lie on Alice’s behalf. More specifically, it’s causing others to lie in pursuit of Alice’s goals. This doesn’t seem so different from Alice lying herself. Perhaps when Carol tries to benefit Alice’s moral views, she should act on what Carol would predict Alice to have put in the book (even if Alice never actually writes such a book).

Interestingly, Toby Ord’s article on the subject contains a hint in the opposite direction: “[I]t is possible that side constraints or agent-relative value could encourage moral trade. For example, someone might think that it is impermissible for them to lie in order to avoid some suffering but that it wouldn’t be impermissible to convince someone else to make this lie in order to avoid the suffering.”

P2: Let’s say Alice and Bob are decision-theoretically similar enough that they would cooperate with each other in a one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma (even under somewhat asymmetric payoffs). Let’s say that Alice could benefit Bob but have to lie in order to do so. Conversely, let’s say that Bob could benefit Alice, but would have to steal in order to do so. Alice believes that one (deontologically) ought not to steal, but thinks that lying is in principle acceptable in and of itself. Conversely, Bob believes that one (deontologically) ought not to lie, but thinks that stealing is acceptable.

Ignoring the deontological constraints, Alice would benefit Bob to make it more likely that Bob benefits Alice. But now what if they take the deontological constraints into account? Would Alice still benefit Bob to make it more likely that Bob benefits Alice? Again, I think it’s plausible that she wouldn’t. By lying in order to benefit Bob, Alice makes it likely that Bob would steal. In some sense Alice makes Bob steal in service of Alice’s goals. It seems intuitive that Alice’s deontological constraints against stealing should still apply. It would be a strange “hack” if deontological constraints didn’t apply in this context; one could circumvent deontological constraints simply by trading one’s violations with others. (It’s a bit similar to the plot of “Strangers on a Train”, in which a similar swap is proposed to avoid criminal liability.) (Again, compare Toby Ord’s comment, as discussed in P1.)

P3: The previous examples illustrate the propagation of negative duties (duties of the “you shalt not…” variety). I’ll here give an example of how positive duties might also transfer.

The country of Charlesia is attacked by its neighbor. Charlesia is a flourishing liberal democracy, so Alice considers it an ethical imperative to protect Charlesia. In order to do so, Alice hires a group of mercenaries to fight on Charlesia’s side. Since time is of the essence, the mercenaries aren’t given a proper contract that specifies their exact objectives, rules of engagement and such.

Two weeks later, the mercenaries find themselves marching through the warzone in Charlesia. They encounter a weak old man who is asking to be evacuated. Doing so would distract significant resources from the mercenaries’ military mission. The mercenaries and their equipment are very expensive. So, clearly, if Alice wanted to spend money in order to help weak old people, she wouldn’t have spent the money on hiring the mercenaries. Thus, if Alice is a pure consequentialist, she wouldn’t want the mercenaries to help the weak old man. So if the mercenaries wanted to act in mercenary fashion (i.e., if they wanted to do whatever Alice wants them to do), should they leave the weak old man to die?

Not necessarily! I think it is entirely plausible that Alice would want the mercenaries to act according to common-sense, not fully consequentialist ethics. That is, it seems plausible that Alice would want the mercenaries to observe the moral obligation to help the old man, as Alice would presumably do if she was in the mercenaries’ place. As in the other cases, it seems intuitive that the mercenaries are in some sense acting on Alice’s behalf. So it seems that Alice would want the mercenaries to act somewhat similar to how she would act.

N1: Let’s say Alice from P1 wants to pay Bob to eat more vegetarian meals. Unfortunately, Bob’s social group believes that “real men eat meat”. Therefore, Bob says that if he becomes a vegetarian (or reducetarian), he’ll have to lie to his friends about his diet. (If this lie is not consequential enough to be ethically relevant, you can add further context. For instance, you might imagine that Bob’s lies will cause his friends to develop less accurate views about the healthiness of different diets.) Let’s say that Alice observes deontological norms of honesty. Does this mean that Bob should reason that becoming a vegetarian wouldn’t be a successful cooperative move towards Alice?

It’s unclear, but in this case it seems quite plausible that Bob can benefit Alice by becoming a closet vegetarian. It seems that the lie is more of a side effect – Bob doesn’t lie for Alice, he lies for himself (or in some sense for his social group). So it seems that (according to conventional ethical views) Alice doesn’t bear much of a responsibility for the lie. So in this case, it seems plausible to me that Alice’s deontological constraint against lying isn’t (strongly) propagated through the trade relationship between Alice and Bob.

N2: The inhabitants of a sparsely populated swampland want to found a state. (Founding a state can be viewed as a many-player trade.) Founding a state would require agreement from Alice – she’s the only accountant in the swampland and the envisioned state would require her to keep an eye on finances. (That said, lots of other inhabitants of the swampland are also individually necessary for the state, and only a small fraction of the state’s tax revenue would come from Alice.) Unfortunately, Alice can’t be present for the founding meeting of the state. Thus, in designing the state, the remaining inhabitants of the swampland have to make guesses about Alice’s interests.

After some discussion, over 90% of the resources of the state have been allocated, all to issues that Alice is known to be on board with: infrastructure, a medical system, social security, educatio, etc. The state policies also include a few measures that Alice agrees with and that only a minority of other inhabitants of the swampland care about, including a museum, a concert hall and a public library.

One of the last issues to be sorted out is law enforcement and in particular the legal system. In the past, vigilante justice has ruled the land. Now a formal set of laws are to be enforced by a police. Everyone (including Alice) agrees that this will reduce crime, will make punishments more humane, and will make it less likely that innocents are unfairly punished. Most inhabitants of the swampland agree that there should be a death penalty for the most severe crimes. However, Alice holds that all killing is unethical. In the past, when she carried out vigilante justice herself, she strictly avoided killings, even when doing so meant letting someone get away with murder.

If the members of the founding meeting propose a state policy that involves the death penalty, must they expect that Alice will refuse to perform accounting for the state?

Again, I think that under many circumstances it’s reasonable for the others to expect that Alice will not block the state. It seems that if people like Alice, then founding states (or other large social arrangements) with Alice would simply be too difficult. Perhaps hermits would reject the state, but agents who function in societies can’t be so fussy.

Conceptualization via a model of deontology. I’ll here propose a simple model of deontological ethics to get a better grasp on the role of deontological norms in trade. I won’t immediately use this model for anything, so feel free to skip this section! 

Consider the following model of deontological values. Let’s say your actions can result in consequences via different types of “impact paths”. Consequentialists don’t care about the impact path – they just care about the consequence itself. Deontologists generally care about the consequences, but also care about the impact path and depending on the type of the impact path, they might care more or less about the consequence. For instance, if an outcome is brought about via inaction, then a deontologist might care less about it. Similarly, impact paths that consist of long causal chains that are hard to predict might matter less to deontologists. Meanwhile, deontologists care a lot about the “empty” impact path, i.e., about cases where the action itself is the consequence. For example, deontologists typically want to minimize lies that they tell themselves much more than they care about not acting in a way that causes others to lie. Which impact paths matter how much is up to the individual deontological view and different deontologists might disagree. (I’m not sure how good of a model of deontological values this is. It’s certainly a very consequentialist perspective. (Cf. Sinnott-Armstrong (2009) [paywalled].) It’s also quite vague, of course.)

In this model of deontological views, trade is simply one type of impact path by which we can bring about outcomes. And then the different types of trades like tit for tat, signing contracts, ECL, and other forms of acausal trade are specific subtypes of impact paths. Different deontologists have different views about the paths. So in particular, there can be deontological views according to which bringing something about by trade is like bringing it about by inaction. But I think it’s more natural for deontologists to care quite a bit about at least some simple impact paths via trade, as argued above.

If impact paths via trade matter according to Alice’s deontological views, then Alice’s trading partners need to take Alice’s deontologist views into account (unless they simply receive explicit instructions from Alice about what Alice wants them to do).

Implications for ECL. (For this section, I assume familiarity with ECL (formerly MSR). Please skip this section if you’re unfamiliar with this.)

Do deontological views matter for how we should do ECL? In principle, it clearly does matter. For instance, consequentialists who otherwise don’t abide by deontological norms (even for instrumental reasons) should abide by deontological norms in their implementation of ECL.

That said, I think in practice there are lots of reasons why following deontological views via ECL might not matter so much, especially because even absent the above consideration ECLers might already take deontological norms into account: (Perhaps this is also a reason why neither I nor anyone else to my knowledge pointed out that my earlier writing on ECL was wrong to claim that deontological views of trading partners can be ignored.)

• Consequentialists typically argue that consequentialism itself already implies that we should follow deontological norms in practice. For instance, consequentialists might say that in practice lies (especially consequential lies) are eventually found out with high enough probability that the risk of being found out typically outweighs the potential benefits of getting away with the lie. It is also sometimes argued that to apply consequentialism in practice, one has to follow simple rules (since assessing all the different possible consequences of an action is intractable) and that the rules proposed by deontologists are rules that consequentialists should follow in lieu of trying to calculate the consequences of all of their actions. If you agree with these sorts of views, then in particular you’d hold that consequentialist ECLers should already abide by deontological norms anyway, even if they only consider the consequentialist aspects of the ethical views they’re trying to benefit. Of course, there might be deontological norms that aren’t justifiable on consequentialist grounds. The propagation of these norms through trade would be relatively important.
• My sense is that pure consequentialists are rare. My sense is that most EAs are, if anything, more likely than others to abide by standard ethical norms (such as not lying). (Sam Bankman-Fried is commonly brought up as an example of an overly consequentialist EA.) In any case, if you yourself already subscribe to lots of deontological norms, then importing deontological norms via ECL makes less of a difference. Again, you might of course specifically not subscribe to some specific popular deontological norms. If so, then ECL makes these norms more relevant to you.
• Even without deontological views in the picture, ECL often pushes toward more deontological-norm-abiding behavior. For instance, ECL suggests a less adversarial posture towards people with other value systems.

Some research questions. I should start by saying that I assume there’s already some literature on the relation between deontological views and trade in the ethics literature. In traditional trade contexts (e.g., paying the baker so that she bakes us bread), this seems like a pertinent issue. For instance, I assume deontologists have considered ethical consumerism. I haven’t tried to review this literature. I would imagine that it mostly addresses the normative ethical dimension, rather than, say, the game-theoretic aspects of it. There’s also a question to what extent the moral trade context is fundamentally different from the traditional economic trade context.

An immediate obstacle to researching the role of deontological views in moral trade is that we don’t have toy models of deontological ethics. For trading on consequentialist grounds, we have some good economic toy models (agents investing in different types of interventions with comparative advantages, see, for example, the ECL paper). Are there corresponding toy models to get a better grasp on trading when deontological constraints are involved? Perhaps the simplest formal model would be that deontologists only agree to a trade if agreeing to the deal doesn’t increase the total number of times that their norms are violated, but that’s arguably too strong.

In real-world trades, one important question is to what extent and how a trading partner’s deontological constraints propagate beyond actions taken specifically to benefit that trading partner. The positive examples above (P1–3) consider cases where agent 1 faces a single choice solely to benefit agent 2 and then ask whether agent 2’s deontological views restrict that choice. Meanwhile, the negative examples above (N1,2) involve more complicated interactions between multiple decision problems and between the interests of multiple actors. So, in general what happens if agent 1 also faces other decisions in which she pursues exclusively her own goals – do the deontological views apply to those actions as well in some way (as in N1)? What should happen in multi-party trade (as in N2)? Let’s say agent 1 makes choices in order to benefit both agent 2 and agent 3, and that only agent 2 has deontological ethics. Then do agent 2’s deontological views fully apply to agent 1’s actions? Or is it perhaps sufficient for agent 2’s participation in the trade to not increase the number of violations by agent 1 of agent 2’s duties? (If so, then what is the right counterfactual for what trade(s) happen?) Of course, these are in part (descriptive) ethical questions. (“How do deontologists want their deontological views to propagate through trade?”) I wonder whether a technical analysis can nonetheless provide some insights. 

Acknowledgments. I thank Emery Cooper and Joseph Carlsmith for helpful comments and discussions.